21. A MURDERER IS BORN
He set off from the deepest of hatreds and arrived, from deep below, and from far away, from so far below and so far away — that then, at the beginning of the beginning, he had not the slightest idea where he was heading; indeed, he didn’t even suspect that there was a route toward anything at all, he had come to hate the country where he lived, come to hate the city where he resided, come to hate the people among whom he stepped onto the metro every morning at dawn, and with whom he traveled home in the evening, it is futile, he said to himself, I have no one here, nothing ties me to this place, let the whole thing go to hell and rot away; since for a good long while he could not decide, he just went with the morning metro and came back with the evening one, back home, and when the day arrived, one morning at dawn, that he no longer stepped onto that metro with the others, he just stood for a while on the platform, there was nothing in his head, he just stood, and he was pushed around, here and there; he picked up one of the free advertising newspapers, then had a beer standing at the counter, and he looked at the want ads and picked out a country along with a job offer, because he knew nothing about it, Spain, that’s a good distance away, so let it be Spain, and from that point on things sped up, and a cheap airline was already dragging him along, he was traveling by plane for the first time in his life, yet he felt nothing other than fear and hatred, for he was afraid of them: he hated the self-confident stewardesses, the self-confident travelers, and even the self-confident clouds that whirled around below him, and he hated the sun and the sparkling light as well — and then he was nearly plummeting down, plummeting down straight into that city, and hardly had he set foot here then he had already been swindled, for of course there was no job behind the job offer, and the money he had saved up was almost immediately gone — it had gone toward the traveling, accommodation for the first few days, and food, so that he could start here, there was no going back, no going back at all — he could start to look for work in this foreign land, which of course he didn’t find, everywhere the “Romanian vagrants” and those of their ilk were chased away, he just wandered around in this beautiful city, and no one would give him any kind of work, and a week passed, and then another and then another, and then another Saturday came along again, so he set off, alone as always, for the city, but this time without hope of work, the weekends were particularly the worst, but he just sauntered, from hate, into it, into anywhere, from one Barcelona street to the next, in the thick Saturday-night multitude of people inebriated by wealth and the pleasures of life; he only had fifty euros, hunger gnawed uselessly in his stomach, he didn’t dare to go in anywhere, because, of course, of his clothes, in these clothes — he looked at himself — it was completely understandable if they wouldn’t let him in anywhere here, and then it happened, he was at that moment walking down the Passeig de Gràcia, that the crowd of people at the intersection swelled to such a density, and all of them in such elegant clothing swelled together and he was forced to stop, he withdrew next to a wall and looked at them from there, because he just didn’t want to be swept along from there, to move on from there, so he stayed by the wall, and because his back was pressed against it, he began to look at the building behind him and he was completely stupefied, for he had already seen many similar perversities in this city, but never anything like this; yet he had come this way before, he must have seen this one as well, but he had passed it in vain, he hadn’t noticed it until now, which was already strange enough, he thought, because this building at the corner of the Passeig de Gràcia and the Carrer de Provença was so colossal, so unwieldy, it weighed down so heavily on the intersection that actually it would be hard not to notice, he slouched further along the wall, then spotted a tourist plaque introducing this spot, which stated that this was the Casa Míla and below, in parentheses, that it was La Pedrera — it was indicating this place precisely — so that this had to mean that the name of the building was Casa Míla, that is, it must be some kind of famous building, well of course, he thought, here in Barcelona, in this district, they could put that on a lot of buildings, not even because it was famous but because it was built by a lunatic, then he took a closer look at the façade, at least as much as he could in the throng of people, and although it was much, but really much uglier than the others, he disliked it for exactly the same reason as he did its companions, as in general he did not like anything that was not